Meg Wolitzer and the Magic of Writing: a Q&A

The prolific novelist Meg Wolitzer, author of the 2013 best-seller The Interestings, a novel about a group of friends who meet at an art camp as teens and go on to grow up together—and apart—as adults, has made her first foray into young adult literature. Her debut Y.A. novel, Belzhar, out this week, is a riff on Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical work, The Bell Jar. Wolitzer places her main character, 16-year-old Jam Gallahue, at a New England boarding school for "emotionally fragile, highly intelligent" teenagers, where she has been sent after sustaining a trauma—"I was sent here because of a boy," she explains in the prologue. "His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died." It's a bit more complicated than that, of course; part of the slow-burning suspense of the book involves finding out what exactly happened to both Reeve and Jam.

At her new school, Jam is enrolled mysteriously in a highly sought after class called "Special Topics in English," along with four other students who are struggling emotionally. Their professor, Mrs. Quennell, teaching the class for her last semester before retirement, assigns The Bell Jar as their reading material, and hands out journals, directing her students to write in them "once the spirit moves you…twice a week." Belzhar is very much a writer's book, as it's through the journal-writing—which comes with some very cool fantasy elements—that the members of the class come together and begin to find ways to cope with what they've experienced. It is through writing that the healing can begin.

Recently, I spoke to Wolitzer about Belzhar, The Bell Jar, and her own life intersections with Plath, as well as the difference between writing for teens and adults, and how she continues to harness the magical powers of writing.

Courtesy of Meg Wolitzer

Photo: Courtesy of Meg Wolitzer

You and Sylvia Plath both did the Mademoiselle internship (though not at the same time). You also studied at Smith, like she did. How else have your paths intersected?

It's a long on-and-off relationship with Plath. When I won the Mademoiselle contest, I did go live at the Barbizon, where she had lived, and I worked in that office. I couldn't help but feel that connection. But I'm such a different person than she is…

When did you first read her?

When I was around 14 or 15 I read The Bell Jar. It's one of those books that has a kind of inevitability about it, because you know the terrible thing that happens to the author, so you don't go to it just as a book. I knew the author had committed suicide. I grew up in the suburbs and read it on the LIRR, and I remember thinking, 'Oh my god, these are feelings that can overwhelm people in their lives,' and wondering if this was going to be what young adulthood was like.

I went to Smith before I transferred to Brown. It was the '70s, and there was a sense that every literary young woman knew the poem "Daddy," had read her journals, was very aware of her and her marriage. Being at Smith, I read about her and saw places she lived and felt more connected to that story, not personally as a depressive, but I felt a kind of self-consciousness about it. My first novel, which is just now back in print, Sleepwalking—I wrote it as a senior at Brown—is about the romance of suicidal poets and the way young women who are not themselves suicidal sometimes flirt with mortality, exploring the edges of melancholy. I used Plath in that first book and then it came around in my adulthood, in revisiting and looking at adolescence. You file things away. It's like with The Interestings, I wasn't thinking when I went to summer camp, 'I'll use this,' but I filed it away.

How does The Bell Jar play into your book?

I just wanted to use the idea of Plath; you don't need to know Plath to understand it. I don't know who learns what in school anymore! But I had to go with the impression that the reader is a feeling, emotional person. I imagined myself young, and going from there I realized I wanted to use a fantastical element, but a light one; it's more metaphorical than anything else. I wanted to look at what it means if you can't cope with something. I went for broke with it, and I loved writing it.

I remember you telling me you had to have a title before you felt like a book was real. When did this title come to you?

I had the title almost immediately. All of my recent books have been "The" books, but this is not—the title is so strange that it stands alone. I remember lying in bed and playing with the words "the bell jar." It sounded kind of like a place.

This is your Y.A. debut. Why Y.A.? What's the difference between writing for teens versus adults?

Young people have this moment they're together in their own society before they scatter. That's what The Interestings and Belzhar have in common, because otherwise they're very different. Belzhar was really a Y.A. story, for me. I knew in The Interestings that the book would take a very long view. But I realized adolescents don't take the long view. There's this sense that what happens is irrevocable. That made me see that not only did I want to try a Y.A. book, but also, Jam's voice had to be first person. It would have a kind of bam-bam-bam immediacy to it. The only other book in recent years I've written in first person is The Wife, and in both cases, the story the characters are telling has some complications. I always say to students, the decision to write something in first rather than third person, it's not arbitrary, but it should be for something that has a voice that's singular, something that has a story that's more sinuous.

Jam and her classmates write in journals that take them to another realm, "Belzhar," where their losses have not yet been sustained. It's a fantastical element, but you've also described it as a metaphor. Tell us more about that.

Originally I was really seeing it as a book about loss and acceptance of loss, and the only thing I had in place was that there would be this world where you could go when you couldn't tolerate what had happened. In writing, as I experimented, that really came out to be the way to do it. I got so excited when I finally wrote it that way. With a book you don't really know why you put certain things in, but then later they serve you well.

There's a twist in the book that I won't spoil but I keep thinking about it…

My agent wrote me, "Well, I did not see that coming." There's a line someone says, "It may not be the worst thing, but it's the worst thing that happened to you"—that's the thing, to honor that. Teenagers have very strong feelings, and you don't have to be Sylvia Plath for things to happen to you that feel so hard you can't accept them.

When I wrote the first draft of The Ten-Year Nap—about women who stop working when their kids are born, and it's 10 years later and they have to figure out what to do with their lives—it was a little judgmental. I thought, who am I to say something about the way people live their lives? A novel is a brief look at how we live. To make fun or try to belittle feelings, that seems a grave error. When people say, "Nobody died, so it's okay," or "You'll meet someone new," that's not helpful. People struggle and suffer and everyone has their own timetable. Belzhar is about one teenager's odyssey in terms of figuring out how to get over something she can't tolerate. It's a book about self-expression and the power of that, and that's something I really believe in. A book is at the heart of it. For me, writing and reading is at the heart of everything.

Tell us about the book cover.

I love my cover. Objects in adolescence are so important, those things your friends give you, things from that event. Objects matter. And it's about how you're holding onto things when you feel your emotional life may be slipping out of your control. I feel they got that right.

In the book, the students write in diaries. Are you a journaler?

I never wrote in journals! I've joked about this. I kept a diary really briefly, an elaborate diary with a key. I felt so bad that I hadn't written in it that I wrote, "nothing happened" on each page. I know people who are major diary keepers, but maybe this is why I'm not a big Twitter or Facebook person; for the most part I'm saving that stuff for fiction. There's just so many times you can dip the bucket into the well. But I do love reading other people's journals.

Do you read Y.A.?

I started reading Y.A. a while ago. My son is really into it. I would try to hit my editor up for boxes of books, and I would remember the pleasure of reading Y.A. when I was young. I was really taken with things I've read. I think there's good writing in all forms and genres now. Also, it's a community. Say what you want about the Internet and what it takes away from us, but I can find such good book writing and recommendations.

Any favorites?

I loved Eleanor & Park. My son introduced me to Looking for Alaska, which was so raw and emotional, I realized I understood more of the depth of who he was. Thinking back on books I read when I was young, My Darling, My Hamburger, by Paul Zindel, about pregnancy, and Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, a play about two girls and their mentally disturbed mother. It's just about the saddest play in the world, but as a teen I didn't judge it as sad or dark, it was just filled with feeling. That's what he did, and later with The Pigman, these were books I really loved. They're so different, Eleanor & Park and My Darling, My Hamburger, but they're part of a tradition of books for teens about teens, unvarnished and trying for a kind of truth about what it is to have these experiences.

What are you writing now?

I'm writing an adult novel at the moment. It's going to be long. Characters become wizened old sages. [Laughs.] No, they don't! Whatever you write helps you write the next thing. If you go deeply into teenagehood, even if you aren't writing about teens the next time, maybe the nut you crack will be useful.

You have this great advice for would-be authors, your "80-page plan," which you've mentioned to me before in an interview. Will you share it again here?

[Laughs] The 80-Page Plan, act now and you will get this mini-chop! Whether it's 80 pages or less or more, the idea is to write enough that you're excited by what you've done, but you don't have to feel despair if you put it aside. You sit and look at it and reckon with what you have. I don't know where I was when I had a big chunk and started to see what this one was about, not what I wanted it to be about. But you see your preoccupation.

What's your writing process? Are you one of those structured people, or more free-wheeling?

When I'm actually in a book, I just want to work all the time. When I'm not in a book, I'm not all that disciplined. You have no idea how many online Scrabble games happen! But I'm not someone who then thinks it's a terrible mistake. I do realize things get wasted, but I'm always kind of talking to myself in my head when I work. My work process is to try to keep the time between the fertility moments as brief as possible, but understanding I'm just a person and not an idea robot, and the ideas don't just endlessly replenish. So in the early stages, I'm reading other people's books, watching a movie, and hoping when that ends I can really just work.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
ELLE participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.